Government workers take note: Your rights to free speech are limited in proportion to your power to both set and enforce a public employer’s policies.

A three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. District Court of Appeals became the third court to say that in affirming the dismissal of a wrongful-firing lawsuit filed by a former University of Toledo hiring chief who opposes gay rights despite her responsibility to uphold the school’s many inclusive policies.

As Inside Higher Edreports, the same argument would not apply to a faculty member publicly declaring the same sorts of views. The court’s opinion (download a PDF here) said it was deciding a very narrow question of whether public speech and writings are constitutionally protected when they oppose “the very policies that her government employer charges her with creating, promoting and enforcing.”

The university fired Crystal Dixon in 2008 from her interim post as associate vice president for human resources because she wrote an op-ed piece in the Toledo Free Press arguing that the gay rights movement should not be compared to the civil rights movement because she, as a black woman, did not get to choose her minority status but, she claimed, homosexuals do. She used as evidence the efforts of some religious groups to convert gay men to straight, a movement questioned by the psychological profession.

The university has policies that specifically referenced inclusion of and protection for all sexual orientations in its strategic plan, a diversity plan, equal hiring policy and anti-harassment policy.

“In writing her op-ed column, Dixon not only spoke on policy issues, but also spoke on policy issues related directly to her position at the University,” the judges’ opinion said.